When Liam Stops Pretending
908 Words
Liam couldn’t sleep.
Not that he ever slept well, but tonight the air felt wrong—heavy, charged, humming like a wire pulled too tight. He sensed a shift the same way he sensed a lie from across a boardroom table.
Kevin wasn’t home.
Worse—Kevin was hiding.
Liam sat on the edge of the couch in the dim apartment, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled against his lips. The only light came from the streetlamp outside, slicing across the living room in soft amber lines.
The apartment felt too still.
Too quiet.
Like something was holding its breath.
Liam checked his phone again. No new messages.
He debated calling Avery—she had seen Kevin last—but he dismissed the thought. Too messy. Too unpredictable. Avery had her own sharpness, her own way of drifting too close to truth.
He stood, pacing once across the room.
Kevin always told him where he went.
Always.
Not because Liam demanded it—no, Liam was smarter than that—but because Kevin was predictably soft. Predictably honest. Predictably his.
So this silence?
This was wrong.
Liam pulled his coat on, ready to go search the city himself if he had to—
—and then he froze.
A sound came from the hallway mirror.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just a soft, delicate tap.
Like a fingertip against glass.
Liam’s heartbeat slowed.
Then steadied.
Then sharpened.
He turned toward the mirror.
Nothing was there.
His own reflection stared back at him—collected, controlled, imperious. Exactly as he crafted himself to be.
But the room behind his reflection…
looked darker.
Like the light bent wrong inside the mirror.
Liam stepped closer.
“Not tonight,” he murmured. “I’m not doing this tonight.”
The mirror didn’t care what he wanted.
A second soft tap.
Then a third.
Then silence.
Liam’s jaw clenched. “Kevin.”
He knew the signs. He knew how thin the boundary had become lately. The shadows in corners that blinked. The reflections that lingered half a second too long. The way Kevin’s presence stirred the air, stirred the glass, stirred her.
He had seen this before.
He had survived it before.
He was ready now.
Or so he told himself.
He grabbed his phone, checked the location-sharing app Kevin didn’t know he still had active.
Nothing.
Kevin had turned it off.
That wasn’t just wrong.
That was impossible for Kevin to think of on his own.
“Who told you to hide from me?” Liam whispered into the empty apartment.
The mirror didn’t answer.
But Liam felt watched.
Not by Kevin.
Not by the city outside.
By something the mirror remembered.
⸻
He left the apartment, locking the door with sharp, precise movements that felt more like ritual than habit.
The hallway was dim and quiet.
Too quiet.
As he walked toward the elevator, he passed the window at the end of the corridor. The night outside reflected back—streetlights, distant traffic, the faint sway of a tree in the wind.
And for a second—
just one—
Liam saw a shape standing behind him.
Not Kevin’s shape.
Smaller.
Thinner.
Head tilted sharply.
Liam did not turn around.
He knew better.
Instead, he spoke to the reflection itself, voice low and controlled.
“Stay out of my way.”
The shape didn’t move.
But the lights in the hallway flickered—softly, twice—like a quiet warning.
Liam didn’t acknowledge it.
He pushed the elevator button.
⸻
Downstairs, the night air felt electric.
He scanned the street, eyes trained, intelligent, predatory. Liam didn’t call it love—he would never call it that—but the word obsession didn’t fit either.
It was responsibility.
Duty.
The promise he made to a six-year-old boy shivering in a broken basement, covered in dust and blood.
Liam would never let Kevin face that alone again.
He pulled out his phone and tried calling one more time.
Straight to voicemail.
He inhaled slowly through his nose.
“Fine,” he murmured. “You want to run? I’ll find you anyway.”
He turned toward the street—
And froze.
In the tinted window of a parked car, he saw Kevin.
Standing just a few feet behind him.
Shoulders tense.
Eyes wide.
Breath quick.
Relief snapped through Liam’s chest like a wire.
“Kevin,” he breathed, turning—
But when he spun around, the sidewalk behind him was empty.
The reflection had lied.
Liam stared at the empty spot for a long, hard moment.
Then his expression shifted—cooling, calculating, darkening into something cold.
“Don’t play games with me,” he whispered to the street, to the glass, to the night, to whatever listened. “Not with him.”
He stepped closer to the car window.
The reflection of “Kevin” still stood there.
Looking at Liam.
Only now the eyes were wrong.
Too dark.
Too empty.
Too aware.
“It’s you,” Liam murmured.
The reflection tilted its head.
Liam’s voice dropped to a razor whisper.
“Stay. Away. From him.”
The reflection smiled.
Not Kevin’s smile.
Something hungry inside it.
And then it faded from the glass.
Not blinked away.
Faded.
Like smoke.
Liam exhaled slowly, steady, composed.
But inside his ribcage something old and ugly coiled awake.
Whatever was after Kevin—
it wasn’t just haunting him.
It was taunting Liam.
And that was a mistake.
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